Beauty is only skin deep, and a pretty face can only go so far. Fortunately, Jim Sterling is both beautiful and wise, so he is basically the perfect lifeform. In a way, he is very much like PC gaming -- visually stunning on the surface, but with a depth that nobody appreciates.

Great video, but I hated eye. It was a buggy piece of shit and infinite respawning really pisses me off when a fucking attack chopper comes at you every minute along with rocket launcher wielding goons.

Now if only console players would listen to this video...

You don't need to upgrade a PC every year and it doesn't cost thousands for a PC. Also the games are cheaper.

all those titles he was talking about....yeah i don't want to play them, well except Recettear. for everything else i want to play on pc that is exclusive to pc : witcher 2 and diablo III and for them i have to spend money to upgrade my PC. good thing witcher 2 coming to xbox. if my core2duo+8800gts will run Diablo III on very low settings then it's will be first PC game i played in years. My reason i'm on consoles because i like J-RPGs and console exclusives and don't care about graphics so i play on consoles all those games that on PC too, i can upgrade my PC just don't see point.

The biggest problem with graphics is that good graphics is insanely expensive to make. Furthermore, the scale is more logarithmic than linear. 10% increase in 'graphics quality' can cost 50% more. So yes, you graphics whore, shut up. We can chose between stupid short simple linear games with 'gooooood' graphics every year or two, or complex, huge games with poorer graphics which take longer to make. Oh wait, we don't have the choice anymore. The short retarded games for graphics whores have won. Well, thanks.

But no, I don't think the 'best' PC games have shit graphics. Don't even start with Minecraft or WOW. Let's be realistic here. Crysis was great and graphics was a good part of that. Graphics is important. Portal wouldn't be Portal without it's style. Yes, it's about STYLE, not about the number of polygons, thousands of motion captures and whatever. Developers, just make the graphic appropriate for the given game. No need to upscale all the time.

I find that one of the biggest perks to PC gaming is the ability to mod games. Openly, freely and usually legally. Consoles don't have this without hoops, and tricks that aren't supported by companies. A lot of cult classics were kept a live for a long time because of the modding scene such as the Half Life series, because of how open the game content was to being modded.

Excellent video. Jim's best so far in my opinion. As someone who's most up to date piece of gaming hardware is a 2 year old laptop I often get scared off by the PC gamer graphics wars. But! When actually getting down to it in the end the games I want to play are the games that run just fine on my laptop (even if it means setting minecraft to fast graphics and making the draw distance tiny when the processor starts to chug a bit) and the fact that I was hesetant was silly.

Also, cheers Jim for pointing out that for backwards compatability alone, PC gaming is a no brainer.

Yes, Thank GOD for Jim, for saying what many of use PC gamers have been trying to say for years. Now that there's an official video, maybe this will put an end to the silly console vs PC threads. (I know i'm being optimistic)

A: What's that big sword?B: What's that game that looked like Serious Sam but had a few weapons I haven't seen?

A: A Chainsword from Warhammer 40k: Space Marine.B: Serious Sam 3.

OT: Good video. I used to be a pure console gamer, but I recently got myself a sweet rig, and I am now a console and PC gamer. And yes, the irony is that most of the games I have been playing are... not very graphic intensive. People need to understand that they don't need a thousand dollar plus rig to play some of the best games on the system.

Waaghpowa:Yes, Thank GOD for Jim, for saying what many of use PC gamers have been trying to say for years. Now that there's an official video, maybe this will put an end to the silly console vs PC threads.

Are you kidding, this will go right over most of their heads.

I don't mind when someone like consoles more than PC, I get annoyed when they spew BS about PC to try and justify being stuck with consoles.

A: What's that big sword?B: What's that game that looked like Serious Sam but had a few weapons I haven't seen?

A: As other people have said, Relic.B: That would be Serious Sam 3: BFE. Croteam decided to add a few more weapons to the mix, specifically a pistol and a sledgehammer. They also decided to add more realistic textures.

OT: Pretty spot on, Jim. PC gaming is more about the abstract, the complicated, and sometimes the wonderfully insane.

I never thought i would say this but; Thank GOD for Jim. Great episode although i would like to add something;

Dear public;

please don't buy a computer from PC world or the like £1000 and expect to run most games. They use shite parts and more often than not don't even have low-end dedicated GPUs. Find something with a core 2 or above, put a 1/2 decent GPU in it and make sure you have plenty of RAM and for under £400 you can run 90% of modern games.

Regards; The Entire Fucking Internet

Seriously folks, many PCs have been miss-sold to the the point you CAN'T play most games on them either because they don't have a dedicated GPU in them or much of the time the PSU is not stable enough to even support higher-end one in some really expensive home PCs. 500w is really your butter-zone. A little knowlege will save you a lot of pain.

Waaghpowa:Yes, Thank GOD for Jim, for saying what many of use PC gamers have been trying to say for years. Now that there's an official video, maybe this will put an end to the silly console vs PC threads.

Are you kidding, this will go right over most of their heads.

I don't mind when someone like consoles more than PC, I get annoyed when they spew BS about PC to try and justify being stuck with consoles.

I really think when you add everything up PC gaming is cheaper than console gaming. I have a really high end rig that I have spent nearly over $2000, if you include my 30" monitor, but the important thing to remember is that even if I never played a single PC game I would have put together the same, or almost the same computer anyway.

Most people own a computer for all the other reasons you would own a computer. Just like most people buy an iPhone to use as a phone but also can game on it. All it takes for most modern machines is the addition of a $100 graphics card and you can play any game that is out, although a few of the toughest titles might run only at low settings.

One of my favorite things about PC gaming, especially now, are all the wonderful indie games we've seen. They are doing stuff the big studios are too afraid to do for fear of releasing a game that doesn't sell 3 million units.

I'd have to disagree on Amnesia: The Dark Descent. This isn't because you can't run it on a lower-end machine (i.e mine) but because it is a game where epic graphics are indeed necessary.

I had to run the game at low-mid settings which ruins several things the game wants to do:

Horrify me

Immerse me

It still did both of these things even with my graphical limitations, yes. However this doesn't negate the fact that if I had a graphical powerhouse that I would of felt more of the two above goals the game had going for it. Put Amnesia on the lowest settings and then on the maximum. Have two fresh pairs of pants and give them to two people who haven't played Amnesia before.

You'll notice the one on the lower graphical settings will have less of a shitty scent than the one who played with full shadow resolution.

The graphics card I pulled from my old machine, I was too poor to shell out for a new one.

apart from that, the whole shebang set me back about £300, and don't listen to the crazy alienware fanatics who say you need to upgrade weekly, sacrificing half your paycheck to your local component store.

Now I happily admit, I think the latest game I'm running on PC is Just Cause 2, but it's flying at 1920x1080 with a bunch of settings up high, on a £300 machine with a 2 year old video card.

On another note, a friend of mine came into some cash and generously bought me a 360 and some games, so I could catch up to this generation, yet guiltily, I believe I've still spent more time on this web flash game, Gemcraft Labyrinth, than all the 360 content I have.

Lastly, please, whatever your opinions of WOW... How successful do you think it would have been if it had needed an i7 processor and a £300 video card. In many cases, being at the cutting edge of graphics technology can seriously limit your game's audience, just look at Crysis. (Oh no, that was piracy wasn't it? yeah, right...) Top tip, if only 200 PCs in the known universe can run your new game, don't cry when you don't sell a million.

To sum up, Blizzard and especially Valve (along with indie devs who can't afford an army of graphics coders), understand that there's a majority of PC gamers who for one, don't really care about technical specs, so long as it looks nice, and secondly, don't have the money to upgrade a PC, if it's that or skip your game, they'll be skipping it. WOW doesn't have 12 million Alienware owners paying them every month.

Thanks Jim for putting the record straight about pc gaming. The true strength of the platform is it's openness and flexibility, both from a games marketing standpoint and the diversity and convergence of technologies. And by technology I mean everything from social media, the internet, open source & modding tools to competition in distribution channels.

Really liking the more thoughtful and less bombastic style Jim, cheers!

What a gaming PC gives you, above all, is versatility. I can play the latest releases then fire up Planescape: Torment; my other half is obsessed with Maxis' A Train and that came out in 1992. I can play Deus Ex and DE:HR on the same machine. Shiny modern stuff, heritage, homebrew, online, casual gaming, episodic adventures, flash, RTS, retro remakes, Steam, emulation, GOG. (Loom is available on Steam, people. LOOM!!!) Choice, people, choice: I loves it I do!

I agree, graphics are hardly the most important thing about games. I still love to play old classics like Warcraft 2, Red Alert and Baldur's Gate. It's nice to play games fluidly at the highest resolution with a nice framerate, but for me it's more important if the story or the gameplay is good.

With graphic fidelity stagnating in recent years, the idea you need a multi thousand dollar PC to run fucking counter strike is becoming less and less true.Last year I built a gaming PC from scratch for €700 that can run everything on medium-high settings, I have not had to upgrade anything yet.

There are a few false claims in this video, the first being that the source engine is the same engine as it was in 2004.

Valve constantly updates it, they even retroactively added HDR lighting to all of Half Life 2 via patches (which is why it still looks so good). This is like saying that because the Infinity Ward Engine uses the Quake 3 team arena engine called ID Tech 3 (and yes, it does) that it's now a 13 year old engine, despite all the extensions IW made to it. It's a completely fallacious statement and I feel it was wrong of Jim to lie like that.

Additionally, Recettear actually does require a pretty powerful computer because it was optimized like absolute shit.

ALL that being said, I understand the point of this video. PC is driving innovation not through graphics, but through gameplay. I also support trying to get non pc-gamers to try out some of the more unique but easy to run titles.